After a cold overnight frost, there was a beautiful sunrise this morning and a cloudless blue sky, so after breakfast we headed up north for our first visit of the year to RHS Harlow Carr on the outskirts of Harrogate. Traffic along the A1 wasn’t too bad this morning and we arrived at the gardens by 10.45am.

My first port of call on arrival is always Betty’s café for a takeaway coffee and biscuit, the coffee is delicious, and when combined with a piece of caramel slice makes for a nice treat. 

There was a steady trickle of visitors this morning. After passing through the visitor’s centre, we headed down the steps and turned left making our way towards the ‘Early learning centre’. The recent landscaping adjacent to the restaurant looked complete and all planted up, it will be nice to see how it looks in the spring and summer. We continued our walk down to the QM lake, stopping to admire the colour of the redwoods and all the clumps of Snowdrops which were flowering nicely amongst the borders, much earlier than ours at home. The area around the sunken Victorian garden was all cordoned off today as maintenance work was being carried out along with the start of additional work around the QM lake including the installation of a footbridge across the corner of the lake. It should look very nice. We headed down to the lake and joined the streamside path towards the old bath house. The views along the stream always change with the seasons and although today were quite bare the views over to the main borders are always colourful. The hellebores are in full flower along with patches of Golden willow as well as the bronze-coloured Japanese cedars. 

On reaching the Bath house we continued up the slope, stopping to admire the new children’s play area on the left before continuing our walk through the arboretum. This is a lovely circular walk amongst the trees, it wasn’t long before we arrived back at the old bath house where we stopped at the outdoor Betty’s for a coffee and sandwich. After our brunch we continued our walk up the gentle slope to the vegetable gardens and glass house. A lot of work looks to have taken place with the addition of several new paths running through the borders. We continued our walk back towards the visitor’s entrance and headed into the garden centre for a perusal and then into the book shop. I love this part of the centre, it is not very often that I leave without purchasing a book of some sort. After several minutes browsing we headed for the exit and set off on our journey home.